Starting Your Internet Business Right

When you're just starting out,
or you are established but want to test new product lines, you don't want to
spend your own money up front for those products, just in case they don't sell.
In this situation, you want a Drop Shipper.

In Product Sourcing, you need to decide whether you're
going to spend money buying bulk quantities of products from Wholesalers,
storing them at your house, and shipping them to your customers yourself. The
deciding factor is usually how well you think the products will sell.

Using
Drop Shippers allows you to sell brand new, brand name products to your
customers without paying for those products before you sell them. In other
words, your customer pays you for the products before you pay
your Wholesale Supplier for them. Pretty cool, huh? :o) Keep in mind that
selling products using Drop Shipping costs you a little more, because the
Drop Shipper does a lot of the work for you and has to charge you a slightly
higher wholesale price. It's a great way to test a product market, though, and
many people use Drop Shippers as a regular and continuing part of their Product
Sourcing Methods.

Here's
how drop shipping works:

1.You open an Internet
Store, or start an account on an Auction site, like eBay.

2.You find a Wholesale
Supplier who is willing to Drop Ship the products you want to sell.

3.You establish an
account with the Drop Ship Supplier(s) you choose.

4.You receive images
and descriptions of the products you want to sell from the Supplier, and place
them on your Internet Store or Auction.

5.A customer finds
your Store or Auction, and falls in love with a product that you have priced
at, say, $80. They purchase the item with their credit card. Your Store or
Auction charges their credit card $80 plus shipping.

6.You email the order
to your Drop Ship Supplier, along with the customer's name and address.

7.The Drop Ship
Supplier sends the product directly to your customer from the warehouse.
Some drop shippers will even place your business name on the package.

9.Your customer gets a
great name brand product from your store or auction shipped to their door, and
they tell all their friends about you, and you make even more money.

There you have it. You just made a $28.00 profit on
one product. You never even touched the product, and you didn't have to pay for
it up front.

Be
careful! There are a LOT of people
out there who want you to believe that they are real Drop Ship
Suppliers, when they are not. We'll talk more about them a little later.
These people are no better than the scam artists who want to fool you into
buying a useless web site. You need to find REPUTABLE Wholesale Suppliers.
A good rule to go by: a REAL Wholesale Drop Ship Supplier does NOT charge
you an "Account Setup Fee" OR "Monthly Fee" just to open or
maintain an account with them. (We'll talk about different fees that can be
associated with drop shipping in a following Chapter).

Quick
Commercial Break:

Our primary focus here at Worldwide Brands is
researching and identifying REAL Wholesale Suppliers. We created the
WBI CertifiedTM Directory of Wholesalers; the Internet's premiere Source of
Factory-Authorized Suppliers and Direct Manufacturers who will Drop Ship for
YOUR Internet business.

The distributors we list are all
genuine Wholesale Suppliers. They will NOT charge you a fee just to open an
account with them. They will NOT force you to buy a minimum number of products.
They WILL ship any of the MILLIONS of products the
Directory represents straight to your customers from their
warehouses, one at a time.

You can Preview the Directory Here.Now, back to business. :o)
Some Drop Shippers charge a small "Drop Ship Fee" per order.
It's important to understand exactly what a "Drop Ship Fee"
is, and how it works.
Remember, Drop Shipping has been around for DECADES; it's not something new
just since ECommerce came along. There are standard practices in Drop
Shipping that have been tested and proven over a period of MANY years, and the
Drop Ship Fee is one of them.

What is a Drop Ship Fee?

It's
simple. A Drop Ship Fee is the "Handling" part of "Shipping
& Handling".

You
know you've seen it before! "Shipping & Handling" is attached to
just about everything you've ever ordered from a catalog, a TV ad, or the
Internet. Just what is that ever-mysterious "Handling" charge?

Consider this:
Wholesale Suppliers usually sell products in bulk quantities. A case
here, 30 cases there, a whole truckload somewhere else. They do not have to individually
pack and ship each item. They just throw some cases of products on a truck and
off they go. That's what they do most often.

When a Wholesale Supplier Drop Ships one single
item for you, they are doing a lot of extra work for you. They call
that work "Handling".

They are storing the product for you, in THEIR
warehouse. You don't have to clean out your garage, or rent that extra space
somewhere.

They
are packing the product for you. You don't have to buy shipping boxes,
envelopes, labels, etc. You don't have to spend the time packing the product. Your
time is a very real expense to your business.

They
are using THEIR UPS or FedEx Account to ship the product directly to your
customer.

They
will handle all returns and damaged goods replacements for you.

This
extra work costs them money, and they have to cover their expenses somehow.

That's a lot of work that YOU don't have to do. That translates into money you SAVE. You not only
have to consider your expenses for everything listed above, you have to learn
that your time costs your business money, too. When you can get someone to
warehouse, package and ship your products for you, you not only save all those
expenses, you save time. Use that time to promote your business, instead of
standing in your garage packing boxes!

So,
the Drop Ship Fee is the "Handling" part of "Shipping and
Handling". It's all the work
done by the Drop Ship Distributor to prepare your single-item order to go out
the door. And...this fee is typically very small!

Some Drop Ship Distributors charge a Drop Ship Fee when they fill an order. As I
said, it's been a normal part of the Drop Shipping business method for decades.

You
pass that fee along to your Customer as a part of your "Shipping &
Handling". However, you may choose to simply include it in the price
of each item you sell, to make your Customer's shipping cost appear lower.

·If
you're charging the Drop Ship Fee as part of your PRICE, then your Store's
PRICE for the Cat Handcuffs will be 31.95, and Mr. Bird will only pay 5.62 in
Shipping & Handling.

Internet
customers are perfectly comfortable with paying Shipping & Handling
charges. Some of the biggest Online Stores on the planet use Drop Shipping
exclusively, and charge the Drop Ship Fees that THEY pay, right back to the
customer, as a "Handling" charge.

Different
Types of Drop Ship Fees:

Drop
Ship Fees are almost always charged on a "Per Address" basis.

That
means that if your distributor's Drop Ship Fee is 2.00, and your customer
orders ONE item from your store, the drop ship fee that you charge them as
"Handling" will be 2.00. It ALSO means that if your customer orders
SEVERAL items, and they all come from the same distributor, the Drop Ship Fee
for the ENTIRE order is STILL just 2.00, since it's all shipped from the distributor
at the same time to the same address.

SOME Drop Shippers charge Drop Ship Fees on a "per
box" basis. It's rare, but does happen sometimes. Now, that does NOT
mean that there is a separate Drop Ship Fee for each ITEM; it's for each BOX.
Most of the time, with multiple-item orders, the distributor can put several
items into the SAME shipping box, and you STILL only pay the Drop Ship Fee
ONCE.

In conclusion,
there are several legitimate ways to Source Products for your Home-based
Internet Business. Using Drop Shippers is one of them, and should be a part of
your Product Sourcing effort, but NOT all of it.